From Hollywood to Highland fling: The Californian film-maker who found unlikely passion in one of Britain's most remote towns...

The horse glowed white in the misty green hills that surrounded us. Close by, I could hear the roar of the ocean.

It was an intoxicating atmosphere, pregnant with challenge, and I felt my resistance waning. Never mind that I was inappropriately dressed — in fishnets and a mini-dress — or that I’d only ever ridden a horse once on a family holiday.

Tartan barmy: Jessica Fox photographed in Wigtown known as Scotland's National Book Town

At first I simply clung on, terrified, to the white horse, struggling to keep my balance. On top of that, the torrential Scottish rain was making it hard to see where I was going.

Then, slowly, I began to feel a rhythm. Soon, my muscles were responding and I was riding free. Afterwards, as I clambered down, dripping wet, I had a sense of incredible power. I’d actually fulfilled one of my lifelong romantic ambitions: riding a white horse bareback through mist-covered hills by the sea.To add to the sense of unreality, I was intensely aware that I’d actually just experienced a dream within a larger and even more improbable dream. And Euan was becoming an ever more intriguing part of it.

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I’d arrived in Britain just a couple of weeks before. As I landed at Heathrow, I’d asked myself: ‘What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?’

Back in Los Angeles, I’d left behind not only a staff job at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), but a promising second career as a film director and scriptwriter. And for what?

The insane truth was that I’d flown across the Atlantic purely because I’d had a recurring vision of a Scottish bookshop by the sea.

I was 25 and had put my entire life
on hold for a month to travel to a country I knew nothing about, live in
the home of a complete stranger — and, yes, work in a real Scottish
bookshop by the sea. As I queued for a connecting flight to Glasgow, where I was due to be met by the owner, I suddenly felt uneasy.

And no wonder: within a few hours, I’d be entering a world that I’d literally dreamt up. The
bookshop had been appearing to me on and off for about a year. Call it
meditation or daydreaming, but I had a weekly ritual that I followed
every Sunday morning.

I’d
flop into a chair, open up a notebook and just allow my mind to drift.
Then I’d write down any images that popped into my head in the hope that
one of them might provide inspiration for a screenplay.

Lately,
whenever I closed my eyes to meditate, I’d see the same image. It was of
a girl, wrapped in a woolly jumper, sitting behind a long wooden desk
in a second-hand bookshop somewhere by the sea in Scotland. She was
leaning back in her chair, her feet up on the desk.

Jessica Fox left behind a staff job at NASA in Los Angeles before setting off for Scotland

I could see the bookshop clearly: tall wooden shelves filled with a mismatch of beautiful old books and a bell over the door. I could smell the shop’s damp, musty perfume.The girl behind the counter huddled deeper into her jumper — it must have been on the cusp of autumn and winter because the steam from her tea swirled in the air in front of her.

She was lost in her thoughts, calm and at peace. And she looked unsettlingly like me. In other visions I saw her on a red bicycle, cycling along a lane. She was surrounded by rolling green hills and the sea was crashing far below her. Next, she was in a pub, surrounded by fresh faces and the smell of beer.

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Daydreams, however, don’t tend to cover the reality of arriving at Glasgow airport looking pale and dishevelled, with dark circles under your eyes. Plus, in my jeans and an ‘I (heartshape) LA’ tank-top, I looked very Californian.

I tried to put on a brave smile. In a few minutes, I was going to meet Euan, the bookshop owner who’d responded to the email I’d sent a month earlier out of the blue when I’d finally decided to make my dream become reality.

It had been remarkably easy. At home in LA, I’d opened my laptop and typed ‘Used bookshop Scotland’ into the search box. My heart was beating so loudly that I could hear it.At the top of the list on my screen was ‘Wigtown, Scotland’s National Book Town’ — and it was right by the sea.

I clicked on the first store that caught my eye — The Bookshop — emailed the owner a brief resume of my career, and asked if I could work for free for a month in return for accommodation. Half an hour later, I had a reply. ‘Dear Jessica’, it said, ‘thank you for your letter could you please tell me more about yourself Euan.’

Hmm. The lack of punctuation and capitalisation suggested Euan might be around 80, unsure of his way round the keyboard.

Still, he couldn’t have been nicer. By the following day, he’d offered me a room in his house and suggested that I come for the annual Wigtown Book Festival. That was just a few weeks away. Without another thought, I booked my ticket. And now I was finally about to meet him.

‘I’m not going to hold up a sign like an idiot,’ he’d written. ‘You’ll recognise me. I’m tall with a mass of curly ginger hair.’

He was right. In the far corner of the arrivals area, I spotted a man sitting on a bench and reading a newspaper. All I could see was a mop of ginger-blond hair sticking up over the top.I put on my best I’m-very-normal-really smile and walked boldly over to him. ‘Are you Eu-aaan?’ I said in my thick American accent. He stood up and we looked at each other with a faint sense of recognition. Then we both smiled with surprised pleasure, perhaps out of relief that neither of us looked outwardly insane.

The book that tells the story of Miss Fox's journey from Hollywood to Wigtown

Back home in LA, I had been a career girl — a NASA media consultant by day and a film-maker in the evenings. Although the combination left me frazzled, it was the life I’d always dreamed of leading, and I was still only 25.

After studying astronomy and mythology at college, I’d worked in film, theatre and TV before starting my own production company in Boston. The call from NASA came a year later, after a mutual friend told them about my background.

It was a dream job. Plus, there was another important reason for moving to California: my broken heart.I wanted to get as far away as possible from Grant, a charismatic actor who’d appeared in one of my films. Ours had been an intense and dramatic year-long affair. And, unfortunately for me, I’d fallen deeply in love.

The end came one day as I was sitting in a production meeting. My phone beeped. It was a text from Grant: ‘I can’t do this any more.’

That’s when my heart broke in two, leaving a lonely, dark and empty centre. Everything about Boston and my work reminded me of him.

Relocating to California proved to be a liberation, and, at first, I embraced the LA lifestyle. I joined a meditation group, I drank my weight in wheatgrass shots and had my chakras realigned.

Sometimes I was invited to parties thrown by big-shots in the movie industry, but they often left me feeling awkward. At the last one I’d attended, actresses with watermelon breasts were parading around in tiny bikinis and I was the only woman wearing a dress.

I was not only missing a sense of belonging but starting to feel dissatisfied with my work-centric life. When, I asked myself, was the last time I’d done anything without calculating how it benefited my career? At the very least, I needed a holiday.

One day, I called my mother and asked her how she’d feel if I went to Scotland to work in a secondhand bookshop. There was a long silence.

‘Fine, as long as you don’t fall in love with anyone there,’ she said.

Euan wasn’t 80. He was in his 30s, slim, with wire-framed glasses on a round, attractive face. Everything about him was neat and tidy, except for his hair, which was a nest of chaos.As we set off in his van on the two‑hour drive west from Glasgow airport, he turned to me and smiled. ‘It’s not every day we get someone so determined to come to Wigtown,’ he said.

It struck me suddenly that I was alone with a stranger, without a phone, and that he could be taking me anywhere. Outside the landscape was becoming intimidatingly remote, with rust-coloured bracken and wandering sheep. However, I felt completely safe and the conversation flowed easily.

Euan, it transpired, had wanted to be a filmmaker before taking over The Bookshop. We tripped over each other, listing films that had inspired us.

By now, we weren’t just rambling along some country lane; we seemed utterly disconnected from the modern world.

The sky was becoming dark and the air had a slicing chill. ‘You have to be especially careful in the winter,’ Euan said. ‘A long time back, a postman and his truck got stuck up here in a snowdrift for days. No one came by and the poor man died.’

Finally, he pulled up in front of a large Georgian townhouse with a shop below. A thrill shot through me. Here I was, about to step into a place that I’d conjured up in my imagination while sitting in the LA heat. I felt as if I were Neil Armstrong, about to take my momentous first step on the moon. A sweet, clear clang rang out as we passed through the door, and I looked up to see a golden bell. I held my breath. It was just like the one I’d seen in my daydream.

Wigtown was officially designated as Scotland's National Book Town in 1998 and is now home to over 20 book-related businesses

Set aglow by the setting sun, the magic of The Bookshop was on display: dark wooden shelves stuffed with books, chandeliers, original fireplaces and the musky aroma of old pages and dust. Through another doorway, a skeleton was hanging from the ceiling, playing the violin.

Upstairs, Euan opened a door to our right and I found myself in a large, dimly-lit kitchen with cream-coloured walls and mint-green cabinets. Candles flickered on the table, among a mass of bottles and glasses which revealed that a dinner party was in progress.

Two men quickly stood up as I entered. I couldn’t imagine receiving the same kind of gentlemanly courtesy in America, let alone at an LA party. And the other two guests — Hannah, an employee of Euan’s, and a friend called Laura — were immediately kind and chatty.

When I woke the next morning, I was greeted by an enchanting sight: slated rooftops with crooked little chimneys, stone walls and a vibrant green hill arching into the sky. Everything was clean, green and fresh. ‘You’re not in Kansas any more, Dorothy,’ I said to myself again, thinking of the familiar thick cloud of smog that hung over LA.

Soon I was pitching in with preparations for the ten-day literary festival and making new friends. The one person I struggled to connect with, however, was Euan, who’d become quiet and elusive. One day, he took me to see Wigtown’s old stone church. We walked in silence through a soft mist. As we turned a corner, a view unfurled of silvery marshland. ‘This is the most beautiful place in the world,’ I gasped.

‘You’re so dramatic, Jessica,’ he said, laughing. His arm grazed my side but he quickly moved away.I still couldn’t quite make him out. He was as mysterious, I noted dreamily, as Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester: friendly one minute and distant the next. Sometimes he’d even walk past me as if I were invisible.

One day, I found an article in the shop which described him as ‘Wigtown’s heart-throb’. As I teased him about it, he turned red. ‘It’s biased. The writer fancied me — and he was a man,’ he protested.Clearly I hadn’t been the only one who found the contrast between his shy, quiet demeanourand his shaggy-haired, boyish good looks attractive.

A Wigtown Book Festival stall holder selling second hand books at Wigtown National Book Town in the Machars of Galloway Scotland

Along with Euan and his friends, who’d come for the festival, I went night-time mountain-biking and swimming in the icy seas. Euan teased me constantly for being ‘so American’, but gradually we relaxed into a friendly relationship.

Why couldn’t I stop thinking of him? He was generous and kind, but I wasn’t getting any signals that my interest was reciprocated. In any case, I told myself, I didn’t come all this way to open up my heart again. After Grant, the next man I had a relationship with would have to be clear about his desire to be with me.

One day Euan showed me his old boarding school, a bleak building to which he’d been sent at the age of seven. Hadn’t he been lonely, I asked.

‘You’re so American, Fox,’ he said. ‘Always wanting to talk about feelings.’

The week before the festival passed in a blur of unrelenting rain, but I didn’t mind. I was in love with the place. For the first time in my life, I felt whole and content. There were chairs to be moved, tables to be brought out of storage and people to meet and greet. But one day, wearing Euan’s wooly jumper, I finally realised my dream of sitting behind the long wooden counter of the bookshop. That night, Euan also took me to a pub — the first I’d ever entered.

‘Jessica, you’re kidding. Don’t they have pubs in America?’ he’d asked. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘but they’re more like bars than what I’d imagine a pub to be.’

I decided not to tell him about my vision of the shop.One evening at the house, I stepped into the hallway and heard Euan in the kitchen talking flirtatiously on the phone. Suddenly, I noticed his friend Laura sitting on the stairs.

‘He’s always been like that,’ she said. ‘For as long as I’ve known Euan, women have adored him.‘I’ll never forget one year, on Valentine’s Day, when he had to buy three different Valentine’s cards. One for this girl he was sort of seeing, one for his ex — well, sort of ex — one for this French girl. It was hilarious.

‘Don’t get me wrong, he’s the best man I know. You see, he’s too nice. He didn’t want to hurt their feelings.’

I didn’t want to hear this. Memories of the humiliation I’d suffered with Grant came flooding back, and my heart suddenly went out to those women Euan had juggled on Valentine’s day. In fact, I was furious. Yet it was none of my business what Euan did or didn’t do; I was just a guest here, nothing more.

Wigtown has been described as a book lovers haven with more than a quarter of a million books to choose from, old and new in its shops

Later that evening, I organised an impromptu talent show at the house. To my surprise, Euan turned up with juggling clubs and lighter fluid, then juggled the flaming clubs easily and rhythmically. I tried to set the image in my memory: here I was, in a beautiful Georgian sitting-room in a remote part of Scotland, with a fire-juggler in front of me — and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. All of a sudden, I didn’t want any of this to end.

The next day, Euan sensed that I was unusually quiet and squeezed my hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘There’s loads of time before you leave.’

My heart fluttered. Increasingly, there seemed to be a connection between us. The literary festival ended not with a bang but with a whimper. Euan’s guests and friends disappeared one by one, like Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, until there were none. Too soon, it was also time for me to go. I was struck by an exquisite sense of pre-emptive homesickness. I’d only spent a month here but, mysteriously, it had come to feel like home.

After our last meal — toad-in‑the-hole, cooked by Euan — he took me outside in the moonlight. Again, I told him that I thought Wigtown was the most beautiful place in the world. This time, he didn’t laugh. ‘I’m glad you think so,’ he said in a tone of deep sincerity.

Another silence descended. Was that as romantic as it felt, I asked myself later? Or was it just Euan being nice on my final night?

The next morning, at the airport, I felt physically ill as he helped me with my luggage to the boarding gate. His curls, brown jacket and sloping shoulders felt as familiar to me now as my own reflection.Without thinking, I gave him a hug. For a moment, I felt him return the embrace, before his arms quickly dropped back at his sides.

It was time to leave. I resisted the temptation to glance back to see if he was still there, watching me go.